When the Obama administration sold its Iran nuclear deal to
Congress in 2015, one of its primary arguments was that the agreement was
narrow. It lifted only nuclear sanctions. America, President Barack Obama told
us, would remain a vigilant foe of Iran's regional predations through sanctions
and other means.

Thanks to stunning
new reporting from Politico's Josh Meyer, we can now assess these
assertions and conclude that they are … well, "alternative facts."

Meyer reports that while the U.S. and other great powers
were negotiating a deal to bring transparency to Iran's nuclear program, top
officials in Obama's government dismantled a campaign, known as Operation
Cassandra, intended to undermine Hezbollah's global drug trafficking and money
laundering network.

A few months after the implementation of that bargain in
January 2016, Operation Cassandra was ripped apart. Agents were reassigned.
Leads and sources dried up. Bad guys got away.

Hezbollah is many things: a Lebanese political party, a
militia and a Shiite religious movement. It is also an arm of Iranian foreign
policy. Hezbollah shock troops fight alongside Iran's Revolutionary Guard
commanders in Syria and Iraq. Iran uses the group's operatives for international
terror attacks in Latin America. Hezbollah's advanced arsenal is supplied by the
Iranian state. Hezbollah's drug trafficking provides the revenue it needs to
spread mayhem. To curb that trafficking is to starve Iran's primary proxy.

The Obama administration believed cracking down on
Hezbollah's trafficking would undermine nuclear negotiations. As David Asher, a
former Pentagon illicit finance analyst and a key player in Operation Cassandra,
told Meyer: “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision. They
serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and
resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The details are troubling. One example involves Ali Fayad,
whom DEA agents suspected was the Hezbollah operative who reported directly to
Russian president Vladimir Putin as a weapons supplier in Iraq and Syria. In
2014 Fayad was arrested by Czech authorities. Meyer reports that even though
Fayad was indicted by U.S. courts for planning the murder of U.S. officials,
"top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on
the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was
lobbying aggressively against it." Fayad eventually found his way back to
Lebanon, and is believed today to be back at his old job, supplying Russian
heavy weapons to Iranian-backed militants in Syria.

If the Trump administration had let Fayad slip through the
net of law enforcement, that would be a five-alarm scandal. And yet for Obama
this was part of a pattern. Obama never asked Syria's neighbors to deny fly-over
rights to Russian aircraft in 2015, which could have slowed or prevented Putin
from establishing air bases in Syria that were used to bomb civilians and aid
workers.

Russia established those air bases less than two months
after the end of the Iran nuclear negotiations. The chief of Iran's Quds Force,
Qassem Suleimani, also saw the close of the nuclear talks as a green light. He
was soon on a plane to Moscow to iron out the tactical alliance between Russia
and Iran in Syria as Obama went about trying to persuade more than a third of
Congress to support the nuclear bargain.

Obama officials reached for comment disputed elements of
Meyer's reporting. Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, pointed to some European
arrests of Hezbollah operatives after the implementation of the nuclear deal.
But Meyer says officials with Operation Cassandra noted that these suspects were
nabbed after the Obama Justice Department shot down efforts to prosecute these
operatives in U.S. courts.

A particularly cringe-inducing response came from a senior
national security official who suggested, anonymously, to Meyer that agents in a
DEA operation might unwittingly botch a CIA or Israeli intelligence operation
within Hezbollah.

That's doubtful, at least for the CIA. As the Los Angeles
Times reported in
2011 the agency's Beirut station, which tracked Hezbollah, was put out of
business after most of its sources were arrested that year. It's highly unlikely
the agency would have been able to build up its source network in a few short
years. What's more, the CIA director for Obama's second term, John Brennan, had
openly discussed his view of trying to separate Hezbollah hardliners from
Hezbollah moderates in Washington policy forums. The decision to go soft on
Hezbollah looks entirely deliberate.

So was all of this worth it? We know what the West got out
of the nuclear deal: a temporary suspension of Iran's nuclear program and
increased transparency into its stockpiles, enrichment facilities and
laboratories. At the time the Obama administration told us that in exchange, the
U.S. had to lift only the crippling nuclear sanctions against Iran. It turns out
the price was much higher.